The Seven Storey Mountain

By Thomas Merton

One of the most famous books ever written about a man’s search for faith and peace.

The Seven Storey Mountain tells of the growing restlessness of a brilliant and passionate young man, who at the age of twenty-six, takes vows in one of the most demanding Catholic orders—the Trappist monks. At the Abbey of Gethsemani, "the four walls of my new freedom," Thomas Merton struggles to withdraw from the world, but only after he has fully immersed himself in it. At the abbey, he wrote this extraordinary testament, a unique spiritual autobiography that has been recognized as one of the most influential religious works of our time. Translated into more than twenty languages, it has touched millions of lives.
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• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Oct 4, 1998
• ISBN: 9780547543819

Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) is widely regarded as one of the most influential spiritual writers of modern times. He was a Trappist monk, writer, and peace and civil rights activist. His bestselling books include The Seven-Storey Mountain, New Seeds of Contemplation, and Mystics and Zen Masters.

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Contents

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Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Epigraph

Dedication

Introduction by Robert Giroux

A Note to the Reader

Part One

Prisoner’s Base

Our Lady of the Museums

The Harrowing of Hell

The Children in the Market Place

Part Two

With a Great Price

The Waters of Contradiction

Part Three

Magnetic North

True North

The Sleeping Volcano

The Sweet Savor of Liberty

Meditatio Pauperis in Solitudine

Index

About the Author

Connect with HMH

Footnotes

Introduction copyright © 1998 by Robert Giroux

Note to the Reader copyright © 1998 by William H. Shannon

Copyright © 1948 by Harcourt, Inc.

Copyright renewed 1976 by the Trustees of the Merton Legacy Trust

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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The poem Song for Our Lady of Cobre on page 310 by Thomas Merton, from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton. Copyright © 1944 by Our Lady of Gethsemani Monastery. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

The poem For My Brother: Reported Missing in Action, 1943 on page 444, by Thomas Merton, from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton. Copyright © 1948 by New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1997 by The Trustees of the Merton Legacy Trust. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Ex parte Ordinis:

Nihil obstat: FR. M. GABRIEL O’ CONNELL, O.C.S.O.

FR. M. ANTHONY CHASSAGNE, O.C.S.O.

Imprimi potest: FR. M. FREDERIC DUNNE, O.C.S.O., Abbot of Our Lady of Gethsemani

Nihil obstat: JOHN M. A. FEARNS, S.T.D., Censor librorum

Imprimatur: ✠ FRANCIS CARDINAL SPELLMAN, Archbishop of New York

ISBN-13: 978-0-15-100413-3

ISBN-10: 0-15-100413-7

ISBN-13: 978-0-15-601086-3 (pbk)

ISBN-10: 0-15-601086-0 (pbk)

eISBN 978-0-547-54381-9

v17.1019

"For I tell you that God is able of these stones

to raise up children to Abraham"

CHRISTO

VERO

REGI

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Introduction

by Robert Giroux

The Seven Storey Mountain was first published fifty years ago, on October 4, 1948. As Thomas Merton revealed in his journals, he had begun to write his autobiography four years earlier, at the Trappist monastery in Kentucky where he had journeyed in December 1941, at age twenty-six, after resigning as a teacher of English literature at St. Bonaventure College in Olean, New York. In a certain sense, Merton wrote, "one man was more responsible for The Seven Storey Mountain than I was, even as he was the cause of all my other writing." This was Dom Frederic Dunne, the abbot who had received Merton as a postulant and accepted him, in March 1942, as a Trappist novice.

I brought all the instincts of a writer with me into the monastery, Merton revealed, adding that the abbot encouraged me when I wanted to write poems and reflections and other things that came into my head in the novitiate. When Dom Frederic suggested that Merton write the story of his life, the novice was at first reluctant to do so. After all, he had become a monk in order to leave his past life behind. Once he began to write, however, it poured out. I don’t know what audience I might have been thinking of, he admitted. I suppose I put down what was in me, under the eyes of God, who knows what is in me. He was soon trying to tone down his original draft for the Trappist censors, who had criticized it severely, especially the account of his years at Clare College (Cambridge University), during which he had become the father of an illegitimate child (killed with the mother apparently in the bombing of London). For this Merton was sent down—expelled—from college, and his English guardian advised him (both his parents were dead) to leave England. He also told Merton to forget about his hopes of a London career in the diplomatic service, so Merton sailed for America and enrolled at Columbia College, where I met him in 1935.

The United States was still in the Depression; the times were serious and so were most undergraduates. Among Merton’s and my classmates were Ad Reinhardt, who became a famous painter; John Latouche, who became famous in the musical theater; Herman Wouk, who became a famous novelist; John Berryman, who became a famous poet; Robert Lax, Edward Rice, Robert Gibney, and Sy Freedgood, close friends who were associated with Merton on the college humor magazine, Jester; and Robert Gerdy, who became an editor at the New Yorker.

We met on the campus when Merton walked into the office of the Columbia Review, the college literary magazine, and showed me some manuscripts, a story, and several reviews, which I liked and accepted. I thought to myself, This man is a writer. He was stocky, blue-eyed, with thinning blond hair, and he was a lively talker, with a slight British accent. He was a junior and I was a senior. He told me of his interest in jazz, Harlem, and the movies—especially W. C. Fields, Chaplin, Keaton, the Marx Brothers, and Preston Sturges, enthusiasms I shared. We were also enthusiastic about Mark Van Doren as a teacher. We went to a couple of movies at the old Thalia, and of course in those leftist days words like religion, monasticism, and theology never came up. I graduated in June 1936, failing to get a job in book publishing (as I had hoped) and finding one at CBS. Then in December 1939 Frank V. Morley, head of the Trade Department of Harcourt Brace & Company, hired me as a junior editor, with the approval of Donald C. Brace (who had cofounded this distinguished firm in 1919 with Alfred Harcourt). Among the first manuscripts I was asked to evaluate was a novel by Thomas James Merton, submitted by Naomi Burton of the Curtis Brown Ltd. literary agency. The hero of The Straits of Dover was a Cambridge student who transfers to Columbia and gets involved with a stupid millionaire, a showgirl, a Hindu mystic, and a left-winger; it all took place in Greenwich Village. I agreed with the other editors that the writer had talent but the story wobbled around and got nowhere. Six months later Naomi resubmitted it as The Labyrinth, an improved replay of the same novel, which was also rejected. Merton was an interesting writer but apparently not a novelist.

For the first time after college, I encountered him in Scribner’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue; this was in May or June 1941. I had been browsing and felt someone touch my arm. It was Merton. Tom! I said, it’s great to see you. I hope you’re still writing. He said, "Well, I’ve just been to the New Yorker and they want me to write about Gethsemani. I had no idea what he meant and said so. Oh, it’s a Trappist monastery in Kentucky, where I’ve made a retreat. This revelation stunned me. I had had no idea that Merton had undergone a religious conversion or that he was interested in monasticism. Well, I hope to read what you write about it, I said. It will be something different for the New Yorker. Oh, no, he said, I would never think of writing about it." That told me a great deal. For the first time I understood the extraordinary change that had occurred in Merton. I wished him well and we parted.

I next heard about him from Mark Van Doren, when I called our old teacher at New Year’s. Tom Merton has become a Trappist monk, Mark said. We’ll probably never hear from him again. He’s leaving the world. An extraordinary young man. I always expected him to become a writer. Tom had left with Mark his manuscript, Thirty Poems, and Mark later submitted it to my friend Jay Laughlin at New Directions, who published it in 1944. Little did we know how many other books would follow.

The partially approved text of The Seven Storey Mountain reached Naomi Burton late in 1946. Her reaction, as Tom noted in his journal, was good: She is quite sure it will find a publisher. Anyway my idea—and hers also—is to turn it over to Robert Giroux at Harcourt Brace. This entry was dated December 13. Fourteen days later he wrote in his journal: "Yesterday at dinner Father Prior handed me a telegram. . . . The first thought that came into my mind was that the manuscript of Mountain had been lost. Naomi Burton gave it to Harcourt Brace only a week ago. I knew quite well that publishers always make you wait at least two months before saying anything about it. . . . I waited until after dinner and opened the telegram. It was from Bob Giroux and it said: "‘Manuscript accepted. Happy New Year!’"

After I had received it by messenger from Naomi, I began reading the manuscript with growing excitement and took it home to finish it overnight. Though the text began badly, it quickly improved and I was certain that, with cutting and editing, it was publishable. It never once occurred to me that it might be a best-seller. Since Frank Morley had left the firm, Donald Brace was temporarily my boss. When I asked him to read it, I was finessed by his asking, Do you think it will lose money? Oh, no, I replied, I’m sure it will find an audience. I told him that Tom had been my classmate at Columbia (both Brace and Harcourt were Columbia men), but I was worried that I might not have been as objective as I should be. Merton writes well, I added, and I wish you’d take a look at it, Don. (I had just become the editor-in-chief.) No, Bob, he said, if you like it, let’s do it. The next day I phoned Naomi with (for that era) a good offer, which she accepted on the monastery’s behalf. (Merton, of course, did not receive one penny of his enormous royalties owing to his monastic vow of poverty; all income went to the community.) Then I sent off the telegram to the monastery.

There were two editorial problems—the offputting sermon-essay with which the book opened and the need of cutting. The opening was an example of misplaced fine writing. It began as follows:

When a man is conceived, when a human nature comes into being as an individual, concrete, subsisting thing, a life, a person, then God’s image is minted into the world. A free, vital, self-moving entity, a spirit informing flesh, a complex of energies ready to be set into fruitful motion begins to flame with potential light and understanding and virtue, begins to flame with love, without which no spirit can exist. It is ready to realize no one knows what grandeurs. The vital center of this new creation is a free and spiritual principle called a soul. The soul is the life of this being, and the life of the soul is the love that unites it to the principle of all life—God. The body that here has been made will not live forever. When the soul, the life, leaves it, it will be dead. . . .

And so on and on for many more pages. I pointed out to Tom that he was writing an autobiography, and readers would want to know at the start who he was, where he came from, and how he got there. The opening was too abstract, prolix, dull. He cheerfully accepted the criticism and finally found the right beginning. In books that become classics (A classic is a book that remains in print—Mark Van Doren) the opening words often seem to be inevitable, as if they could not possibly have been otherwise—Call me Ishmael, Happy families are all alike, It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Merton’s new opening began: On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadows of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world. This is personal, concrete, vivid, and it involved the reader in the story immediately. There remained the job of editorial polishing—removing excess verbiage, repetitions, longueurs, dull patches. I must say that Merton was very responsive and cooperative about all these minor changes. "Really, the Mountain did need to be cut, he wrote a friend. The length was impossible. The editor at Harcourt was, is, my old friend Bob Giroux. . . . When you hear your words read aloud in a refectory, it makes you wish you had never written at all."

Then a crisis arose in the midst of the editing. Merton told Naomi that another censor, the last to be heard from, was refusing permission for the book to be published! Unaware that the author had a contract, this elderly censor from another abbey objected to Merton’s colloquial prose style, which he considered inappropriate for a monk. He advised that the book be put aside until Merton learned to write decent English. Naomi expressed my opinion when she wrote: "We consider your English to be of a very high order." We also felt that these anonymous censors would have suppressed St. Augustine’s Confessions if given the chance. Under the circumstances I advised Merton to appeal to the Abbot General in France and to our relief the Abbot General wrote that an author’s style was a personal matter. This cleared the air and the censor wisely reversed his opinion. (My own guess was that Merton, born in France, wrote the Abbot General—who did not read or speak English—in such excellent French that he concluded Merton’s English prose must also sing.) At last the Mountain could be published.

When advance proofs arrived in the summer of 1948, I decided to send them to Evelyn Waugh, Clare Booth Luce, Graham Greene, and Bishop Fulton Sheen. To my delight they all responded in laudatory, even superlative terms, and we used the quotes on the book jackets and in ads. At this point Mr. Brace increased the first printing from 5,000 to 12,500 and later to 20,000 when three book clubs took it. In November, a month after publication, it sold 12,951 copies but in December it shot up to 31,028. From mid-December to after New Year’s is usually the slowest period for orders, because bookstores are so well stocked by then. This new pattern of sales was significant—the Mountain was a best-seller! It’s hard now to believe that the New York Times refused to put it on their weekly list, on the grounds that it was a religious book. By May 1949, when the monastery invited me and other friends for Merton’s ordination as a priest, I brought along, as a gift, copy No. 100,000 in a special morocco leather binding. (During a visit there last year, Brother Patrick Hart, who had been Merton’s secretary, pointed it out to me on their library shelf.) The records show that the original cloth edition sold over 600,000 copies in the first twelve months. Today, of course, including paperback editions and translations, the total sale has reached the multiple millions, and Mountain continues to sell year after year.

Why did the success of the Mountain go so far beyond my expectations as an editor and a publisher? Why, despite being banned from the best-seller lists, did it sell so spectacularly? Publishers cannot create best-sellers, though few readers (and fewer authors) believe it. There is always an element of mystery when it happens: why this book at this moment? I believe the most essential element is right timing, which usually cannot be foreseen. The Mountain appeared at a time of great disillusion: we had won World War II, but the Cold War had started and the public was depressed and disillusioned, looking for reassurance. Second, Merton’s story was unusual—a well-educated and articulate young man withdraws—why?—into a monastery. The tale was well told, with liveliness and eloquence. There were other reasons, no doubt, but for me this combination of the right subject at the right time presented in the right way accounts for the book’s initial success.

One sign of its impact was the resentment it inspired in certain quarters—not only with hostile reviewers but with fellow religious who thought it inappropriate for any monk to write. I remember receiving hate mail saying, "Tell this talking Trappist who took a vow of silence to shut up! Though silence is a traditional part of their lives, Trappists take no such vow. Maintaining silence (to increase contemplation) does not by itself rule out communication (which they do in sign language). I had an answer for the hate-mongers: Writing is a form of contemplation."

One amusing incident soon after publication was a phone call I received from a police station in the Midwest. Some drunk, loudly proclaiming he was Thomas Merton and had left the monastery, was arrested for disturbing the peace. The police asked me to talk to him, but I said, There’s no need for that. Just ask him to name his literary agent. Of course he didn’t know her name and exposed himself as a fraud.

The celebrity that followed the book’s publication became a source of embarrassment to Tom, one reason being that he quickly left his twenties behind and developed incredibly as a scholar and writer. Like Huckleberry Finn, he grew up fast. Of all the writers I’ve known—and I’ve known some great ones—none had his speed of intellectual growth, which deepened and matured as the years went by in a way that is remarkable. If he had expected to withdraw from the world, it did not happen. Instead, as his fame and writing increased, he heard from Boris Pasternak in Russia, from Dr. Daisetz Suzuki in Japan, Dr. Louis Massignon and Jacques Maritain in France, Canon A. M. Allchin at Canterbury Cathedral, poet Czeslaw Milosz in Poland, and Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Many others, famous and unknown, with whom he corresponded widened his horizons more and more.

Two years before his death he wrote a preface to the Japanese edition of The Seven Storey Mountain, which contains his second thoughts about the book almost twenty years after he had written it:

Perhaps if I were to attempt this book today, it would be written differently. Who knows? But it was written when I was still quite young, and that is the way it remains. The story no longer belongs to me. . . . Therefore, most honorable reader, it is not as an author that I would speak to you, not as a storyteller, not as a philosopher, not as a friend only. I seek to speak to you, in some way, as your own self. Who can tell what this may mean? I myself do not know, but if you listen, things will be said that are perhaps not written in this book. And this will be due not to me but to the One who lives and speaks in both.

Thomas Merton died in 1968 while attending a conference of eastern and western monks in Bangkok. Today, on the fiftieth anniversary of Mountain, I think again of Mark Van Doren’s words, which Tom and I as students heard in his classroom: A classic is a book that remains in print.

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A Note to the Reader

by William H. Shannon

Founding President of the

International Thomas Merton Society

Published on October 4, 1948, The Seven Storey Mountain was an instant success. Hailed as a twentieth-century version of the Confessions of St. Augustine, it has for fifty years continued to sell and sell and sell. Evelyn Waugh, no easy critic, wrote prophetically that The Seven Storey Mountain might well prove to be of permanent interest in the history of religious experience. Graham Greene suggested that it was an autobiography with a pattern and meaning valid for all of us. Its readership has continued to expand, extending far beyond its country of origin. More than twenty foreign language translations have appeared, one of the most recent being Chinese.

Published just three years after the end of World War II, The Seven Storey Mountain struck an instant and sensitive nerve in America and eventually in other parts of the world. Its timing was perfect, coming as it did when, disillusioned by war and searching for meaning in their lives, people were ready to hear the well-told story of a young man whose search ended in remarkable discovery.

Yet, like every classic work, The Seven Storey Mountain may need some introduction for the new reader. Since it is being released in a special anniversary edition, this Note to the Reader may be able to anticipate some difficulties and offer some clarifications so that the reader can approach the book in a comfortable mood and with a clear understanding of what Thomas Merton is about as he narrates with youthful enthusiasm the story of his conversion to the Catholic faith.

I see three principal ways in which The Seven Storey Mountain may surprise or confuse readers: the outdated religious atmosphere that pervades it; the missing information a reader would like to have but on which the author is silent; the interpretation the writer gives to his story.

RELIGIOUS ATMOSPHERE

This book, written by a young monk wondrously happy in his early years in a Trappist monastery and writing while still under the glowing ardor of his conversion experience, is of course unabashedly Roman Catholic. But the Roman Catholic Church you encounter in this book is almost light years removed from the church that we recognize as the Roman Catholic Church today. Today’s church is the product of the revolution (not too strong a term) set in motion by the Second Vatican Council.

The pre–Vatican II church into which Merton was baptized was a church still reacting—even three centuries later—to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Characterized by a siege mentality, wagons-circled around doctrinal and moral absolutes, it clung to its past with great tenacity. An institution apart, it showed little desire to open itself to the questions and needs of a world undergoing huge and unprecedented changes. The church prided itself on the stability and unchangeable character of its teaching in this context of a world in flux. At the time Merton wrote his book, Roman Catholic theology had become a set of prepackaged responses to any and all questions. Polemical and apologetic in tone, its aim was to prove that Catholics were right and all others wrong. This arrogance and confident air of superiority are charmingly captured in a Brendan Beahan story about the Catholic bishop of Cork, Ireland, who, when informed by his secretary that the Church of Ireland bishop of Cork had died, smugly remarked: Now he knows who is the real bishop of Cork.

Today, fifty years removed from this rigid ecclesial atmosphere, it may be difficult to identify with Thomas Merton’s enthusiastic acceptance of the church’s triumphalist mentality. Yet, like many converts who found their way into the church after years of aimless wandering, he initially welcomed it lock, stock, and barrel. He was happy to replace the doubts and uncertainties of his past with the unquestioned and unquestioning certitude of the Catholic Church of the mid-twentieth century. Confident in his belief that he belonged to the one true church, he all too often speaks disparagingly about other Christian churches—mirroring the church’s complacent triumphalism himself. Even fifty years ago this triumphalism proved a problem for some readers of other religions, who sensed the book’s power but were bewildered by its narrow religiosity. One young woman, although obviously moved by her reading, lamented: Why is he so vituperative about Protestants? Are they that bad? Readers today will be better able to put this narrowness in historical perspective and thus be less bothered by it.

People continue to read The Seven Storey Mountain because the story of how Merton arrives at this certitude is so compelling. We are swept along with this young man as he seeks to make something out of his heretofore undisciplined life. Today, as we hover on the verge of a new millennium, we can identify with his searching, if not always with the specific direction it took. Merton’s personal magnetism, the enthusiasms of his convictions, the vivid narratives of this born writer, transcend the narrowness of his theology. His story contains perennial elements of our common human experience. That is what makes it profoundly universal.

MISSING INFORMATION

In the early summer of 1940 Thomas Merton, accepted by the Franciscan Order, was living in Olean and planning to enter the Franciscan novitiate in August. In the middle of the summer he was struck with a sudden anxiety. He realized that he had not told the novice director the complete story of his life. There were facts about his past that he had failed to reveal. He returned to New York City to tell all, hoping that his past would not matter. Apparently it did. He was instructed to withdraw his application to the Franciscans. His hopes were shattered. Brokenhearted, he looked for a job and was hired to teach at St. Bonaventure University.

In 1948—and later as well—readers had no inkling what he meant by telling all. Some years later the story emerged that, while at Clare College, Cambridge, Merton’s sexual drives, unaccompanied by any sense of their true human meaning, led to disaster not only for him but also for an unmarried woman who bore his child. Nothing further is known of her or the child. At one time (in February 1944) Merton did try to get in touch with her, but she seems to have disappeared.

After this devastating experience in New York City, Merton was convinced that he was forever barred from the Roman Catholic priesthood. He does not tell his readers the reason for this conviction, but it must have been based on the conversation he had had with the Franciscan novice director. The Seven Storey Mountain is silent about what was said in that conversation. More than a year later, however, a Franciscan priest at St. Bonaventure told him that he had been mistaken in thinking that his rejection by the Franciscans meant that he could never become a priest. There was no impediment to his ordination. This news freed him to go to the Trappist monastery in Kentucky, where in 1949 he was ordained a priest.

INTERPRETING THE MERTON STORY

Like many great works, the Merton story may be read on three different levels of meaning. First, there is the historical level: what actually happened in his life. Second, there is the remembered level: what Merton was able to recall of the events of his life. Memory is often selective, which means that the remembered past may not always coincide with the historical past. Finally, there is the level of monastic judgment. By this I mean that Merton wrote The Seven Storey Mountain as a monk. His monastic commitment colors the way Thomas Merton (his religious name was Father Louis) tells the story. The Seven Storey Mountain, I believe it can be said, is the story of a young man named Thomas Merton being judged by a monk named Father Louis. It is helpful to the reader to understand that at times the monk tends to be quite severe in his judgments of the young man.

Thomas Merton concludes his story with these words: Sit finis libri, non finis quaerendi. They may be translated, Let this be the ending of the book but by no means the end of the searching. These are prophetic words. The Merton of The Seven Storey Mountain did not disappear; he simply grew. His later writings are the story of his growth to maturity and openness to the future. Observing this growth is the delight that awaits those who go on from The Seven Storey Mountain to read his later works.

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Part

One

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One

Prisoner’s Base

On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating Him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers.

Not many hundreds of miles away from the house where I was born, they were picking up the men who rotted in the rainy ditches among the dead horses and the ruined seventy-fives, in a forest of trees without branches along the river Marne.

My father and mother were captives in that world, knowing they did not belong with it or in it, and yet unable to get away from it. They were in the world and not of it—not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.

My father painted like Cézanne and understood the southern French landscape the way Cézanne did. His vision of the world was sane, full of balance, full of veneration for structure, for the relations of masses and for all the circumstances that impress an individual identity on each created thing. His vision was religious and clean, and therefore his paintings were without decoration or superfluous comment, since a religious man respects the power of God’s creation to bear witness for itself. My father was a very good artist.

Neither of my parents suffered from the little spooky prejudices that devour the people who know nothing but automobiles and movies and what’s in the ice-box and what’s in the papers and which neighbors are getting a divorce.

I inherited from my father his way of looking at things and some of his integrity and from my mother some of her dissatisfaction with the mess the world is in, and some of her versatility. From both I got capacities for work and vision and enjoyment and expression that ought to have made me some kind of a King, if the standards the world lives by were the real ones. Not that we ever had any money: but any fool knows that you don’t need money to get enjoyment out of life.

If what most people take for granted were really true—if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now.

If happiness were merely a matter of natural gifts, I would never have entered a Trappist monastery when I came to the age of a man.

II

My father and mother came from the ends of the earth, to Prades, and though they came to stay, they stayed there barely long enough for me to be born and get on my small feet, and then they left again. And they continued and I began a somewhat long journey: for all three of us, one way and another, it is now ended.

And though my father came from the other side of the earth, beyond many oceans, all the pictures of Christchurch, New Zealand, where he was born, look like the suburbs of London, but perhaps a little cleaner. There is more sunlight in New Zealand, and I think the people are healthier.

My father’s name was Owen Merton. Owen because his mother’s family had lived for a generation or two in Wales, though I believe they were originally Lowland Scotch. And my father’s father was a music master, and a pious man, who taught at Christ’s College, Christchurch, on the South Island.

My father had a lot of energy and independence. He told me how it was in the hill country and in the mountains of the South Island, out on the sheep farms and in the forests where he had been, and once, when one of the Antarctic expeditions came that way, my father nearly joined it, to go to the South Pole. He would have been frozen to death along with all the others, for that was the one from which no one returned.

When he wanted to study art, there were many difficulties in his way, and it was not easy for him to convince his people that that was really his vocation. But eventually he went to London, and then to Paris, and in Paris he met my mother, and married her, and never went back to New Zealand.

My mother was an American. I have seen a picture of her as a rather slight, thin, sober little person with a serious and somewhat anxious and very sensitive face. And this corresponds with my memory of her—worried, precise, quick, critical of me, her son. Yet in the family she has always been spoken of as gay and very lighthearted. My grandmother kept great locks of Mother’s red hair, after she died, and Mother’s happy laughter as a boarding-school girl was what never ceased to echo in my grandmother’s memory.

It seems to me, now, that Mother must have been a person full of insatiable dreams and of great ambition after perfection: perfection in art, in interior decoration, in dancing, in housekeeping, in raising children. Maybe that is why I remember her mostly as worried: since the imperfection of myself, her first son, had been a great deception. If this book does not prove anything else, it will certainly show that I was nobody’s dream-child. I have seen a diary Mother was keeping, in the time of my infancy and first childhood, and it reflects some astonishment at the stubborn and seemingly spontaneous development of completely unpredictable features in my character, things she had never bargained for: for example, a deep and serious urge to adore the gas-light in the kitchen, with no little ritualistic veneration, when I was about four. Churches and formal religion were things to which Mother attached not too much importance in the training of a modern child, and my guess is that she thought, if I were left to myself, I would grow up into a nice, quiet Deist of some sort, and never be perverted by superstition.

My baptism, at Prades, was almost certainly Father’s idea, because he had grown up with a deep and well-developed faith, according to the doctrines of the Church of England. But I don’t think there was much power, in the waters of the baptism I got in Prades, to untwist the warping of my essential freedom, or loose me from the devils that hung like vampires on my soul.

My father came to the Pyrenees because of a dream of his own: more single, more concrete, and more practical than Mother’s numerous and haunting ideals of perfection. Father wanted to get some place where he could settle in France, and raise a family, and paint, and live on practically nothing, because we had practically nothing to live on.

Father and Mother had many friends at Prades, and when they had moved there, and had their furniture in their flat, and the canvasses piled up in the corner, and the whole place smelling of fresh oil-paints and water-color and cheap pipe tobacco and cooking, more friends came down from Paris. And Mother would paint in the hills, under a large canvas parasol, and Father would paint in the sun, and the friends would drink red wine and gaze out over the valley at Canigou, and at the monastery on the slopes of the mountain.

There were many ruined monasteries in those mountains. My mind goes back with great reverence to the thought of those clean, ancient stone cloisters, those low and mighty rounded arches hewn and set in place by monks who have perhaps prayed me where I now am. St. Martin and St. Michael the Archangel, the great patron of monks, had churches in those mountains. Saint Martin-du-Canigou; Saint Michel-de-Cuxa. Is it any wonder I should have a friendly feeling about those places?

One of them, stone by stone, followed me across the Atlantic a score of years later, and got itself set up within convenient reach of me when I most needed to see what a cloister looked like, and what kind of place a man might live in, to live according to his rational nature, and not like a stray dog. St. Michel-de-Cuxa is all fixed up in a special and considerably tidy little museum in an uptown park, in New York, overlooking the Hudson River, in such a way that you don’t recall what kind of a city you are in. It is called The Cloisters. Synthetic as it is, it still preserves enough of its own reality to be a reproach to everything else around it, except the trees and the Palisades.

But when the friends of my father and mother came to Prades, they brought the newspapers, rolled up in their coat pockets, and they had many postcards carrying patriotic cartoons, representing the Allies overcoming the Germans. My grandparents—that is, my mother’s father and mother in America—were worried about her being in a land at war, and it was evident that we could not stay much longer at Prades.

I was barely a year old. I remember nothing about the journey, as we went to Bordeaux, to take the boat that had a gun mounted on the foredeck. I remember nothing about the crossing of the sea, nothing of the anxiety about U-boats, or the arrival in New York, and in the land where there was no war. But I can easily reconstruct the first encounter between my American grandparents and their new son-in-law and their grandson.

For Pop, as my American grandfather was called in the family, was a buoyant and excitable man who, on docks, boats, trains, in stations, in elevators, on busses, in hotels, in restaurants, used to get keyed up and start ordering everybody around, and making new arrangements, and changing them on the spur of the moment. My grandmother, whom we called Bonnemaman, was just the opposite, and her natural deliberateness and hesitancy and hatred of activity always seemed to increase in proportion to Pop’s excesses in the opposite direction. The more active Pop became and the more he shouted and gave directions, the more hesitant and doubtful and finally inert was my grandmother. But perhaps this obscure and innocent and wholly subconscious conflict had not yet developed, in 1916, to the full pitch of complications which it was to attain some fifteen years later.

I have no doubt that there was a certain amount of conflict between the two generations when Father and Mother determined that they were going to find their own kind of a house and live in it. It was a small house, very old and rickety, standing under two or three high pine trees, in Flushing, Long Island, which was then a country town. We were out in the fields in the direction of Kiljordan and Jamaica and the old Truant School. The house had four rooms, two downstairs and two upstairs, and two of the rooms were barely larger than closets. It must have been very cheap.

Our landlord, Mr. Duggan, ran a nearby saloon. He got in trouble with Father for helping himself to the rhubarb which we were growing in the garden. I remember the grey summer dusk in which this happened. We were at the supper table, when the bended Mr. Duggan was observed, like some whale in the sea of green rhubarb, plucking up the red stalks. Father rose to his feet and hastened out into the garden. I could hear indignant words. We sat at the supper table, silent, not eating, and when Father returned I began to question him, and to endeavour to work out the morality of the situation. And I still remember it as having struck me as a difficult case, with much to be said on both sides. In fact, I had assumed that if the landlord felt like it, he could simply come and harvest all our vegetables, and there was nothing we could do about it. I mention this with the full consciousness that someone will use it against me, and say that the real reason I became a monk in later years was that I had the mentality of a medieval serf when I was barely out of the cradle.

Father did as much painting as he could. He filled several sketch books and finished some water-colors along the waterfront in New York, and eventually even had an exhibition in a place in Flushing which was maintained by some artists there. Two doors away from us, up the road, in a white house with pointed gables, surrounded by a wide sweep of sloping lawn, and with a stable that had been turned into a studio, lived Bryson Burroughs, who painted pale, classical pictures something like Puvis de Chavannes and who, with some of the gentleness you could see in his work, was very kind to us.

Father could not support us by painting. During the war years we lived on his work as a landscape gardener: which was mostly plain manual labor, for he not only laid out the gardens of some rich people in the neighborhood, but did most of the work planting and caring for them: and that was how we lived. Father did not get this money under false pretenses. He was a very good gardener, understood flowers, and knew how to make things grow. What is more, he liked this kind of work almost as much as painting.

Then in November 1918, about a week before the Armistice of that particular World War, my younger brother was born. He was a child with a much serener nature than mine, with not so many obscure drives and impulses. I remember that everyone was impressed by his constant and unruffled happiness. In the long evenings, when he was put to bed before the sun went down, instead of protesting and fighting, as I did when I had to go to bed, he would lie upstairs in his crib, and we would hear him singing a little tune. Every evening it was the same tune, very simple, very primitive; a nice little tune, very suitable for the time of day and for the season. Downstairs, we would all fall more or less silent, lulled by the singing of the child in the crib, and we would see the sunrays slanting across the fields and through the windows as the day ended.

I had an imaginary friend, called Jack, who had an imaginary dog, called Doolittle. The chief reason why I had an imaginary friend was that there were no other children to play with, and my brother John Paul was still a baby. When I tried to seek diversion watching the gentlemen who played pool at Mr. Duggan’s saloon, I got into much trouble. On the other hand, I could go and play at Burroughs’ place, in their garden and in the room full of old lumber over the studio. Betty Burroughs knew how to join in games in a way that did not imply patronage, though she was practically grown up. But for friends of my own age, I had to fall back on my imagination, and it was perhaps not a good thing.

Mother did not mind the company I kept in my imagination, at least to begin with, but once I went shopping with her, and refused to cross Main Street, Flushing, for fear that the imaginary dog, Doolittle, might get run over by real cars. This I later learned from her record of the affair in her diary.

By 1920 I could read and write and draw. I drew a picture of the house, and everybody sitting under the pine trees, on a blanket, on the grass, and sent it to Pop in the mail. He lived at Douglaston, which was about five miles away. But most of the time I drew pictures of boats. Ocean liners with many funnels and hundreds of portholes, and waves all around as jagged as a saw, and the air full of v’s for the sea-gulls.

Things were stimulated by the momentous arrival of my New Zealand grandmother, who had come from the Antipodes to visit her scattered children in England and America, as soon as the war had ended. I think she brought one of my aunts along with her, but I was most of all impressed by Granny. She must have talked to me a great deal, and asked me many questions and told me a great number of things, and though there are few precise details I remember about that visit, the general impression she left was one of veneration and awe—and love. She was very good and kind, and there was nothing effusive and overwhelming about her affection. I have no precise memory of what she looked like, except that she wore dark clothes, grey and dark brown, and had glasses and grey hair and spoke quietly and earnestly. She had been a teacher, like her husband, my New Zealand grandfather.

The clearest thing I remember about her was the way she put salt on her oatmeal at breakfast. Of this I am certain: it made a very profound impression on me. Of one other thing I am less certain, but it is in itself much more important: she taught me the Lord’s Prayer. Perhaps I had been taught to say the Our Father before, by my earthly father. I never used to say it. But evidently Granny asked me one night if I had said my prayers, and it turned out that I did not know the Our Father, so she taught it to me. After that I did not forget it, even though I went for years without saying it at all.

It seems strange that Father and Mother, who were concerned almost to the point of scrupulosity about keeping the minds of their sons uncontaminated by error and mediocrity and ugliness and sham, had not bothered to give us any formal religious training. The only explanation I have is the guess that Mother must have had strong views on the subject. Possibly she considered any organized religion below the standard of intellectual perfection she demanded of any child of hers. We never went to church in Flushing.

In fact, I remember having an intense desire to go to church one day, but we did not go. It was Sunday. Perhaps it was an Easter Sunday, probably in 1920. From across the fields, and beyond the red farmhouse of our neighbor, I could see the spire of St. George’s church, above the trees. The sound of the churchbells came to us across the bright fields. I was playing in front of the house, and stopped to listen. Suddenly, all the birds began to sing in the trees above my head, and the sound of birds singing and churchbells ringing lifted up my heart with joy. I cried out to my father:

Father, all the birds are in their church.

And then I said: Why don’t we go to church?

My father looked up and said: We will.

Now? said I.

No, it is too late. But we will go some other Sunday.

And yet Mother did go somewhere, sometimes, on Sunday mornings, to worship God. I doubt that Father went with her; he probably stayed at home to take care of me and John Paul, for we never went. But anyway, Mother went to the Quakers, and sat with them in their ancient meeting house. This was the only kind of religion for which she had any use, and I suppose it was taken for granted that, when we grew older, we might be allowed to tend in that direction too. Probably no influence would have been brought to bear on us to do so. We would have been left to work it out more or less for ourselves.

Meanwhile, at home, my education was progressing along the lines laid down by some progressive method that Mother had read about in one of those magazines. She answered an advertisement that carried an oval portrait of some bearded scholar with a pince-nez, and received from Baltimore a set of books and some charts and even a small desk and blackboard. The idea was that the smart modern child was to be turned loose amid this apparatus, and allowed to develop spontaneously into a midget university before reaching the age of ten.

The ghost of John Stuart Mill must have glided up and down the room with a sigh of gratification as I opened the desk and began. I forget what came of it all, except that one night I was sent to bed early for stubbornly spelling which without the first h: w-i-c-h. I remember brooding about this as an injustice. What do they think I am, anyway? After all, I was still only five years old.

Still, I retain no grudge against the fancy method or the desk that went with it. Maybe that was where my geography book came from—the favorite book of my childhood. I was so fond of playing prisoner’s base all over those maps that I wanted to become a sailor. I was only too eager for the kind of foot-loose and unstable life I was soon to get into.

My second best book confirmed me in this desire. This was a collection of stories called the Greek Heroes. It was more than I could do to read the Victorian version of these Greek myths for myself, but Father read them aloud, and I learned of Theseus and the Minotaur, of the Medusa, of Perseus and Andromeda. Jason sailed to a far land, after the Golden Fleece. Theseus returned victorious, but forgot to change the black sails, and the King of Athens threw himself down from the rock, believing that his son was dead. In those days I learned the name Hesperides, and it was from these things that I unconsciously built up the vague fragments of a religion and of a philosophy, which remained hidden and implicit in my acts, and which, in due time, were to assert themselves in a deep and all-embracing attachment to my own judgement and my own will and a constant turning away from subjection, towards the freedom of my own ever-changing horizons.

In a sense, this was intended as the fruit of my early training. Mother wanted me to be independent, and not to run with the herd. I was to be original, individual, I was to have a definite character and ideals of my own. I was not to be an article thrown together, on the common bourgeois pattern, on everybody else’s assembly line.

If we had continued as we had begun, and if John Paul and I had grown up in that house, probably this Victorian-Greek complex would have built itself up gradually, and we would have turned into good-mannered and earnest sceptics, polite, intelligent, and perhaps even in some sense useful. We might have become successful authors, or editors of magazines, professors at small and progressive colleges. The way would have been all smooth and perhaps I would never have ended up as a monk.

But it is not yet the time to talk about that happy consummation, the thing for which I most thank and praise God, and which is of all things the ultimate paradoxical fulfilment of my mother’s ideas for me—the last thing she would ever have dreamed of: the boomerang of all her solicitude for an individual development.

But oh, how many possibilities there were ahead of me and my brother in that day! A brand-new conscience was just coming into existence as an actual, operating function of a soul. My choices were just about to become responsible. My mind was clean and unformed enough to receive any set of standards, and work with the most perfect of them, and work with grace itself, and God’s own values, if I had ever had the chance.

Here was a will, neutral, undirected, a force waiting to be applied, ready to generate tremendous immanent powers of light or darkness, peace or conflict, order or confusion, love or sin. The bias which my will was to acquire from the circumstances of all its acts would eventually be the direction of my whole being towards happiness or misery, life or death, heaven or hell.

More than that: since no man ever can, or could, live by himself and for himself alone, the destinies of thousands of other people were bound to be affected, some remotely, but some very directly and near-at-hand, by my own choices and decisions and desires, as my own life would also be formed and modified according to theirs. I was entering into a moral universe in which I would be related to every other rational being, and in which whole masses of us, as thick as swarming bees, would drag one another along towards some common end of good or evil, peace or war.

I think it must have been after Mother went to the hospital that, one Sunday, I went to the Quaker meeting house with Father. He had explained to me that the people came and sat there, silent, doing nothing, saying nothing, until the Holy Spirit moved someone to speak. He also told me that a famous old gentleman, who was one of the founders of the Boy Scouts of America, would be there. That was Dan Beard. Consequently I sat among the Quakers with three more or less equal preoccupations running through my mind. Where was Dan Beard? Would he not only be called beard, but have one on his chin? And what was the Holy Spirit going to move all these people to do or say?

I forget how the third question was answered. But after the man sitting in the high wooden rostrum, presiding over the Quakers, gave the signal that the meeting was ended, I saw Dan Beard among the people under the low sunny porch, outside the meeting-house door. He had a beard.

It was almost certainly in the last year or so of Mother’s life, 1921, that Father got a job as organist at the Episcopalian church in Douglaston. It was not a job that made him very happy or enthusiastic. He did not get along very well with the minister. But I began to go to the church on Sundays, which makes me think that Mother was in the hospital, because I must have been living with Pop and Bonnemaman in Douglaston.

The old Zion church was a white wooden building, with a squat, square little belfry, standing on a hill, surrounded by high trees and a large graveyard, and in a crypt underneath it were buried the original Douglas family, who had settled there on the shore of the Sound some hundred years before. It was pleasant enough on Sundays. I remember the procession that came out of the sacristy, a choir of men and women, dressed in black, with white surplices, and led by a Cross. There were stained glass windows up behind the altar, one had an anchor on it, for its design, which interested me because I wanted to go to sea, and travel all over the world. Strange interpretation of a religious symbol ordinarily taken to signify stability in Hope: the theological virtue of Hope, dependence on God. To me it suggested just the opposite. Travel, adventure, the wide sea, and unlimited possibilities of human heroism, with myself as the hero.

Then there was a lectern, shaped like an eagle with outspread wings, on which rested a huge Bible. Nearby was an American flag, and above that was one of those little boards they have in Protestant churches, on which the numbers of the hymns to be sung are indicated by black and white cards. I was impressed by the lighting of candles on the altar, by the taking up of the collection, and by the singing of hymns, while Father, hidden behind the choir somewhere, played the organ.

One came out of the church with a kind of comfortable and satisfied feeling that something had been done that needed to be done, and that was all I knew about it. And now, as I consider it after many years, I see that it was very good that I should have got at least that much of religion in my childhood. It is a law of man’s nature, written into his very essence, and just as much a part of him as the desire to build houses and cultivate the land and marry and have children and read books and sing songs, that he should want to stand together with other men in order to acknowledge their common dependence on God, their Father and Creator. In fact, this desire is much more fundamental than any purely physical necessity.

At this same time my father played the piano every evening in a small movie theater which had been opened in the next town, Bayside. We certainly needed money.

III

And probably the chief reason why we needed money was that Mother had cancer of the stomach.

That was another thing that was never explained to me. Everything about sickness and death was more or less kept hidden from me, because consideration of these things might make a child morbid. And since I was destined to grow up with a nice, clear, optimistic, and well-balanced outlook on life, I was never even